What is the best-selling country album of all time?
Country music has been around for an incredibly long time, almost going toe to toe with its close relatives in folk and blues music as one of the longest-living genres that still has a contemporary audience. The fact that it has remained such a cultural mainstay is testament to how easily it can grab the listener with just a few small elements: its breezy instrumentation, simple yet effective songwriting, and incredibly detailed and layered approach to lyricism and storytelling.
It may have had moments where it has slipped outside of the mainstream, but country music is currently experiencing the biggest boom in popularity in decades, with artists such as Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan all being contemporary acts who have taken a traditional approach to the genre and found their way to the top of the charts with their efforts. In other regards, Taylor Swift, Post Malone and Shaboozey have all seen their brand of pop merge with country elements to offer a slightly different approach to the genre, but can still ostensibly be seen as staying true to form.
You can also look at a record like Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter as an example of a major crossover record that has merged country with a multitude of other styles, but while it was praised for its genre-blurring attitude and opening of the doors for musicians of different artistic backgrounds to attempt to make country music, that doesn’t mean this was the first instance of such a record to exist. In fact, it has always been necessary for genres to merge, whether country or otherwise, in order for them to remain culturally significant, and it’s one of the major reasons why those adopting a traditional approach can still enjoy success.
But in terms of what the biggest-selling country record of all time is, is it one of the older artists who kickstarted the craze in the first place, or is it one of the more modern trailblazers who took country and merged it with other styles? There have been plenty of country albums that have shifted significant units over the last century, but only one has performed to a level where it dwarfs all competition.
So, what is the best-selling country album?
While you might look at legends of country such as Garth Brooks, Johnny Cash, or Dolly Parton as likely candidates for having the best-selling country record, none of them come remotely close in sales to the actual champion, who was certainly a pioneer when it came to blending country with other popular styles at a time when the genre was floundering in terms of commercial success.
Canadian singer-songwriter Shania Twain burst into the public eye with a series of singles in the late 1990s that fused country with modern pop stylings, and her third album, Come On Over was an immense success, selling 40 million copies worldwide since 1997. Songs such as ‘Man, I Feel Like a Woman’ and ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’ were borderline inescapable at the time of release, and for several years afterwards, and the impact that the record had on the charts and record sales as a result has seen it become the seventh-biggest selling record of all time.
Twain was far from being the first, and certainly isn’t the last, to have merged country with pop in this fashion, but it did seem like a huge turning point in the public perception of country music and where it could be taken artistically at a point where it wasn’t the most fashionable genre in the 1990s. If you observe the popularity of artists like Taylor Swift in today’s market, one can easily argue that her trajectory could have been significantly different had it not been for the path that was paved for her by Twain a couple of decades before.
While you can potentially argue that Eagles have a right to claim having an even bigger country album, with their 1976 compilation Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) having achieved 44 million sales, the fact that it’s a compilation that blends some of their earlier country rock work with the soft rock style that they later adopted may be strong enough grounds for disqualification. Come On Over, on the other hand, is country through and through – it just came wrapped with a new perspective that helped pave the way for the genre’s future.
